Streams Alternatives

streams reviews and mentions

• We deserve a better streams API for JavaScript
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2026

  I don’t know how ReadableStream.tee() got specified to backpressure when the faster branch is not consumed, since this is the opposite of what nodejs does when multiple Writables attached via Readable.pipe() and also the opposite of what the requirements document (https://github.com/whatwg/streams/blob/e9355ce79925947e8eb49...) says: “letting the speed of the slowest output determine the speed of the tee”.

  I like the idea of the more ergonomic, faster api in new-stream with no buffering except at Stream.push(). NodeJS and web streams put infinitely expandable queues at every ReadableStream and WritableStream so that you can synchronously res.write(chunk) as much as you want with abandon. This API basically forces you to use generators that yield instead of synchronously writing chunks.

• Introducing our Next-Generation JavaScript SDK
  4 projects | dev.to | 25 Nov 2024

  StarlingMonkey is a JavaScript runtime we’ve built together with our friends at Fastly and contributed to the Bytecode Alliance. It’s built on top of SpiderMonkey in a highly modular way, making it easy to configure as needed for our use case. Crucially, it comes with an implementation of key web APIs that substantially improve compatibility with the web ecosystem, like the fetch API for handling outgoing HTTP requests, key parts of the Service Workers spec for handling incoming requests, streaming processing of request and response bodies using the web’s Streams API streamssetTimeout, and setInterval.

• Rewriting Rust
  23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Sep 2024

  Every single JS future is boxed. Moreover, they aren't just boxed, they are often backed by a hashmap (which may or may not be optimised away by the JIT). Elaborate allocation-free async is not an apple-to-apples comparison, that's my point.

  JS does support concurrent execution, Promise.all is an example. Without it, JS async would make little sense. The problem very much exists there, and try-catch is only a surface-level answer. As you can see here [1], the interaction of cancellation and async in JS is at least just as (or more) complex than in Rust.

  By the way, multithreading has little to do with Pin. I presume you're thinking of Send bounds.

  "To work at all" is very dismissive. It's complex, but very well abstracted, well defined, and robust, that complexity is essential. Again, look at [1], JS async is hardly less complex, but also much more vague and ill-defined.

  [1]: https://github.com/whatwg/streams/issues/1255

• Backpressure explained – the resisted flow of data through software
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2024

  Yup, this is what WHATWG's Streams spec[0] (linked in the article) says. It defines backpressure as a "process of normalizing flow from the original source according to how fast the chain can process chunks" where the reader "propagates a signal backwards through the pipe chain".

  Mozilla's documentation[1] similarly defines backpressure as "the process by which a single stream or a pipe chain regulates the speed of reading/writing".

  The article confuses backpressure (the signal used for regulation of the flow) with the reason backpressure is needed (producers and consumers working at different speeds). It should be fairly clear from the metaphor, I would have thought: With a pipe of unbounded size there is no pressure. The pressure builds up when consumer is slower than producer, which in turn slows down the producer. (Or the pipe explodes, or springs a leak and has to drop data on the ground.)

  [0] https://streams.spec.whatwg.org/#pipe-chains

  [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Streams_API...

• Streams Standard
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2024
• Streams and React Server Components
  2 projects | dev.to | 14 Jan 2024

  // https://streams.spec.whatwg.org/#example-transform-identity const { writable, readable } = new TransformStream(); fetch("...", { body: readable }).then(response => /* ... */); const writer = writable.getWriter(); writer.write(new Uint8Array([0x73, 0x74, 0x72, 0x65, 0x61, 0x6D, 0x73, 0x21])); // "streams!" writer.close();

• Goodbye, Node.js Buffer
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2023
• Are you using generators?
  2 projects | /r/learnjavascript | 30 Jun 2023

  // AudioWorkletStream // Stream audio from Worker to AudioWorklet // guest271314 2-24-2020 let port; onmessage = async e => { 'use strict'; if (!port) { [port] = e.ports; port.onmessage = event => postMessage(event.data); } const { urls } = e.data; // https://github.com/whatwg/streams/blob/master/transferable-streams-explainer.md const { readable, writable } = new TransformStream(); (async _ => { for await (const _ of (async function* stream() { while (urls.length) { yield (await fetch(urls.shift(), {cache: 'no-store'})).body.pipeTo(writable, { preventClose: !!urls.length, }); } })()); })(); port.postMessage( { readable, }, [readable] ); };

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  www.saashub.com | 15 Jun 2026

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